- Mass Market Paperback: 13 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; Reprint edition (27 Jan 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140288481
- ISBN-13: 978-0140288483
- Product Dimensions: 19.7 x 13.1 x 1.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,795,277 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
"A work of gorgeous, enduring prose". -- The Washington Post
Product Description
Nominated for numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and PEN Center USA-West's annual literary award, this debut collection by a young Chinese-American writer has garnered stellar reviews and invited comparisons to Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. These stories reveal the lives of immigrant families haunted by lost loves: a ghost seduces a young girl into a flooded river; a mother commands a daughter to avenge her father's death; and a woman speaks from beyond the grave about her tragic marriage to a man whose own disappointments nearly destroy their two daughters. In luminous prose Lan Samantha Chang weaves the forces of war and magic, food and desire, ghosts and family, into haunting tales that signal the arrival of an exciting new writer and "a work of gorgeous, enduring prose" (The Washington Post).
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
I picked up this book with a few trepidations. Not one was realized. I was enthralled by the stories, the characters and the interactions within the book. Not only are relationships drawn perfectly but you gain a real feel of a different viwepoint, a different culture. You start to understand how people cope when they leave all they know to enter a completly new world.
The book doesn't draw laborious examples, instead as the stories progress you begin to understand what drives the characters. How they cope with an alien life, and how their coping affects everyone around them.
I loved this book, couldn't put it down. I would really recommend you read this book. It is full of well-written stories that will expand the way you look at people and look at the world.
The book doesn't draw laborious examples, instead as the stories progress you begin to understand what drives the characters. How they cope with an alien life, and how their coping affects everyone around them.
I loved this book, couldn't put it down. I would really recommend you read this book. It is full of well-written stories that will expand the way you look at people and look at the world.
Format:Paperback
A very special book that touches you and makes you think. Even days after I had read the book I couldn't stop thinking of what Lan Samantha Chang had written - espescially in "Hunger".
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
17 reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Intimate stories with resonant themes
15 Nov 2001
Format:Mass Market Paperback
"Hunger" is the opening novella and anchor for this collection of short stories. Chang is a graceful author with just the right touch of sensitivity and insight into the lives of Chinese immigrants in America. The special talent here is in the individual attention Chang gives to each family, each story. This is not a social history portrayal of the masses. While the family structures are seemingly uniform (husband and wife and one or two children) and the range of vocations unsurprising (restaurant workers, music prodigies, math and tech specialists), the characters are more emotionally dimensional than one would suspect.
*** The theme of hunger is the dramatic thread running through all the stories -- hunger for personal expression, parental acceptance or love, or independence. The immigrant experience is a poignant paradox of being closely tied to one's family or home and yet feeling the fierce need to pull away in order to succeed. The ultimate hunger becomes not one extreme or the other, but in wanting both polar opposites to work at once. It is an impossible hunger to satisfy and yet continually churning at the core of every character.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
*~ i DeEpLy aDmiRe LaN SaMaNthA cHanG's WoRk ~*
28 May 2001
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Two words...Thank you! I myself am a Chinese-American girl and strive to be a writer. I have lately become more and more interested in looking into the work of Chinese-American authors, and found her book in the bookstore while trying to think of every Chinese last name I could! The book I found was the last copy they had, but I have no regrets in buying it! It's a book full of stories that really and truly capture what it's like for Chinese immigrants to come to America and find Americanized everything. To be honest, everyone loves the famous author Amy Tan...but I think Chang outdoes her in many aspects!
Her style for one is beyond Tan's. While Amy Tan writes with primitive simpleness (basically, a way that any person can write) Chang writes intelligently and intellectually. She is someone who not only wrote this story for the surface meaning of it, but there is hidden depth and philosophy.
What i liked the most, is that she didn't use the same basic Chinese stereotypes that every Chinese-American author usually uses such as the "ah"s at the end of every name, the overdone superstition of ghosts, etc. She reveals knowledge in her writing and is the first author who I have seen reveal the Chinese culture for what it REALLY is. I hope she writes more books, because I would buy them all in a heartbeat! Thank you so much. I strive to do what she has done for me! Enjoy every page of what she has written with the utmost admiration and respect.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Fabulous
18 Feb 2000
Format:Mass Market Paperback
These stories are wonderful--highly recommended. Chang's sentences are gorgeous, and her observations are moving. Her characters are well-rounded and complicated, and their plights are sympathetic--the kind of characters that stay with you. The stories are a fine balance of subtlety and utter stark clarity.
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